Observations on language, literature, and other interesting phenomena

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About

Let me explain.

In my professional life, I have worn many hats. I have a B.A. as well as several years of graduate school in Linguistics. My Master’s degree is in Deaf education, and I have two certificates in teaching English as a Second Language. I have taught ESL in Turkey and in Portugal, and am now teaching writing and English Literature at a community college.

It’s safe to say that I’m quite in love with language.

Mrs. Parker (left) and Zelda (right) will be making regular appearances.

Though I am not a professional linguist in that I don’t engage in official, sponsored scholarly research, I reserve the right to introduce discussions with the phrase “As a linguist…” My studies are independent and part of my life-long quest to understand as much as I can about language: what we say, how we say it, how we don’t say it, how we should or shouldn’t say it, or how we mess it all up.

I started this blog to combine my love of language with my childhood dream of writing. My goal is to comment on language and literature in a way that is more accessible and entertaining to those who have not formally studied these subjects, but without diluting the ideas for the sake of simplicity or mass consumption.

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32 thoughts on “About”

lol, yeah, you got me to with the ‘as a linguist’, too.
Sometimes I can impress people with “As a non-native speaker..” but it only works with those who have at least a rudimentary knowledge of a foreign language.. or with linguists.
:)

It works on me! I’m always impressed by fluency in other language. I mean, I do okay – I won’t starve and I can tell off a taxi driver in a couple of different countries, but mostly, my second-language is broken :)

I’m really looking forward to reading your past, present, and future posts. I, too, am an English teacher (well an English teacher in waiting). I’m finishing up tests, papers, training, etc. Hopefully, August 2011 I will get my own classroom.

Perhaps, I will learn something from you! :) And I love the bottom of this page–Zelda & Mrs. Parker don’t like plagiarists! Too cute! :)

I can help you about Turkish language :) Hi, Leonore! Thank you first of all visiting my blog, you are so nice. And yes, seems that the cats of this city amazing for us! I loved your cats too. English Language is my second one and I have been trying to write poem for a long time. Actually I love both of them, I mean English languga and poetry! But cats moreeeeeee. I am so glad to meet with you and also to meet with your beautiful blog. I’ll be your new reader. Greetings and Love, nia

I like your blog. :-)
I’m not a linguist but…
I often trip over Tagalog, English, and Spanish.
I dream and write in English (the fruit of two decades+ of life in America). But I curse in Tagalog (my husband caught me).
Looking forward to your future posts.

One of my linguistics professors say that a person’s strongest language will often reveal itself in the language used to curse, talk to animals, count, or have sex. We proposed an experiment to test this theory of hers but she was afraid it wouldn’t be quite ethical to approve it ;)